Offender Management Bill

I start by thanking the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe), for the competent and well-humoured way in which he conducted himself on Report; that was appreciated by the whole House. Moving on to the Home Secretary’s extensive speech, which took up the majority of the time allocated for Third Reading, he painted a warm, fuzzy picture of what he believed some of his hon. Friends would like the Bill to be, and of what he believed he might persuade them that it meant. That picture bears little relation to the words in the Bill, or to its consequences, if it is passed tonight. The Home Secretary employed the common ground shared by all parties. We all want a seamless transition between prison, the probation service and, beyond that, proper rehabilitation in the community. We all want those services to be improved; that is common ground, and we do not need the Bill to achieve it. He said that he wants to supplement, rather than supplant, the probation service, but if he intends to supplement it, why did he not accept the amendments proposed by the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard)? Why did he not accept that some core areas are the proper province of the probation service, but that in other areas, it would be possible to supplement what the probation service does with proper involvement of the voluntary and charity, or indeed private, sectors? We have to take into account what we heard before today’s speech. We must hear the mood music—the famous speech at Wormwood Scrubs, and the rubbishing of much of the probation service’s work, which took place before this debate and before the introduction of the Bill. During the stages of the Bill, there has been no indication of how it will address the failings that the Home Secretary perceives in the performance of the probation service. The repeated refrain was that the Bill will engage the services of the charity and not-for-profit sectors in ways that are not possible at the moment, but it was never said what the barriers were to engaging those services under current legislation. Many of us believe that those barriers are not there. The only answer that the Minister gave, in the Bill’s earlier stages, was that the Bill would change the culture of the probation service—a proposition that I find laughable. We should consider the reality of the Bill before us, including what are purported to be Government concessions. I repeat that giving a concession with one hand while including, in the same group of amendments, a new clause that provides for repeal of that concession, seems an extraordinary way of doing business. Basically, this is a centralising Bill that concentrates power directly in the hands of the Secretary of State and his appointees. What clearer illustration of that could there be than the fact that the Home Secretary presented as a major concession the provision for probation trust chairmen to be drawn from the areas in which the trusts work. That is not a concession but local accountability—the chair should have a relationship to the area with which the trust is involved. The Bill will result in a great failing in accountability. At the moment, if a mistake is made in the probation service, the service is publicly accountable, both locally and nationally. The Home Secretary can order an inquiry and the probation inspectorate can conduct an inquiry on its own initiative. We can raise such matters in the House, and remedy or improvement can be made. Under the contracted-out arrangements, if there are errors the best that can happen is a breach of contract, which is remediable under civil law. That is not the way in which such a desperately important service should operate. We face the prospect of newly appointed commissioners with no direct experience commissioning services from newly appointed operatives with no direct experience of providing such services. We opposed the Bill on Second Reading, and we have been entirely consistent in our view. We hoped that the Secretary of State would redesign the Bill to achieve the objectives that he set out today, but he has not done so. He has not taken the advice proffered in Committee and on the Floor of the House, and for that reason, we stand resolute, and we will oppose the Bill again this evening.